Subject: 5 Color Red
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 23:38:28 GMT
From: c s i v i l s @ h o t m a i l . c o m (Craig Sivils (csivils@hotmail.com))
Newsgroups: rec.games.trading-cards.magic.strategy

I'm now at liberty to post what our team has refered to as 5 color
Craig.  The deck has gone through several variations and I'm bascially
posting my favorite version even though we did modify it beyond this
point.  The deck won a couple local tournaments and made semi's at a
Texas Semi-Pro Qualifier.  We started playing it when red in the
Houston environment was nearing extinction, now red/black is all over
and people are well prepared for it.

5 Color Craig

2 Rocky Tar Pits
2 Quicksand
2 Reflecting Pools
2 Undiscovered Paradise
2 Gemstone Mines
2 City of Brass
1 Red/Green depletion
1 Black/Blue depletion
1 Red/Black depletion
2 Swamp
5 Mountains
3 Mogg Fanatics
3 Shadow Guildmage
3 Fireslingers
3 Bone Dancers
3 Uktabi Orangatangs (scrolls/orbs/disks everywhere).
1 Sand Stalker
1 Frenetic Efreet
1 Lhugoyf (Always loved playing this and seeing peoples expressions).
3 Nekrataal
4 Diabolic Edict
4 Kindle
4 Incinerate
1 Hammer
1 Impulse

Sideboard contained all kinds of stuff depending on what we expected
the metagame to be, blasts (red and blue) eagles, disenchants, the 4th
monkey, honorable passages, furnaces, glooms, havoc and always
sleights.  The sideboard was always heavily anti-control (but control
comes in up to 4 different colors (never green)).

The very core of this deck is based upon the fact that red-black has
such a braindead base for creature control.  4 kindle + 4 incinerate +
4 edict provides 12 instant speed removal for 2 mana.  You hardly have
to think and even if your deck stalls at two mana you can quite often
hold the opponent off until you get some mana.  5 Color red started
off as a blitz deck with dauthi horros/fireblasts and gravitated more
towards a midpoint deck with bone dancers/hammers.

In it's prime, the deck was basically a ton of card advantage type
removal with a few cameo appearance type win cards (Orgg's, Shivans,
black fat, goyf, X spells, it had 3-4 spots for a variety of
highlander style road's to victory which we varied depending on the
metagame and how crazy we felt).  It was a fun deck to play.  As the
deck got more serious it cut the goyf/slingers for more
guildmages/frenetics and added a 2nd hammer at the expense of the
impulse.

Many times man-o-wars were suggested, many times they were play tested
and always dropped.  They aren't right for this deck.  Why bounce when
you can destroy?  Pain lands were at a minimum to allow life to drive
the pingers.

The best thing about 5 Color Craig was that even after the match some
opponents had no clue what we were playing :)

Craig